Table of Contents
Artificial Life: A Very Quick Introduction
The goal of this course is to quickly get students up to scratch with some basic ideas of artificial life. The core part of the course is a practical assignment in which students should implement a simple artificial life environment in NetLogo. After having taken this course, the students will have an overview picture of the domain of artificial life and autonomic computing, and will be able to program simple to moderately complex multi-agent environments in NetLogo.
This course requires some basic experience in computer science, but prior knowledge of NetLogo is not mandatory. It is part of the course “Calcul autonomique” (“Autonomic computing”) taught to students following the CILS MSc. program at Université d'Évry. The teaching language is French.
The course consists of 3 sections: a brief introduction to autonomic computing, a brief introduction to artificial life, and the practical assignment.
The materials of this course are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Alone licence 
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1. Introduction to autonomic computing
This section provides a high-level overview of autonomic computing by listing the desired properties of autonomic systems and the evolutionary levels to reach them.
The slides for this section (in French) are available here.
2. Introduction to artificial life
This section provides a high-level overview of artificial life. It gives some examples of systems which are and which are not artificial life, and then lists the types of artificial life. This section prepares the lab assignment by quickly recalling cellular automata and by giving some links to NetLogo-related resources.
The slides for this section are available here.
3. Artificial life in an environment with gravity
This section is a practical assignment proposing to students to implement an artificial life environment with gravity. The suggested implementation platform is NetLogo. For students who have never used NetLogo before, the assignment includes a warm-up exercise proposing to implement Conway's Game of Life.
This lab assignment is a simplified version of the internship (in French) proposed by Nicolas Glade and carried out by Clément Hege.
The text of this lab assignment (in French) can be downloaded here.
